Recap of the First Bastion
The first Bastion opened on the first snowfall of winter, as Marquise Elizabeth and Marquis Andiron Falaeth prepared for their Sadah banquet. Sadah, the preeminent holiday of the winter season, had become the preeminent social event of the season thanks to the Falaeth's exquisite banquets, and so all of Bastion high society eagerly awaited the occasion. Among these were Turel Meresin, a recent arrival to Bastion who had attracted attention by occupying the suite of the Golden Carrack, Bastion's most exclusive hotel. He unknowingly encountered the beautiful Marquise in the Drake Street Market, a popular street venue for goods of all kinds, and was taken with the woman's wit, poise, and beauty. Meanwhile, war was brewing in Bastion's Waterfront district. Long dominated by the rival criminal cartels the Dragon's Disciples and the Whispering Ring, the district began to feel the rising tensions as the fragile peace began to erode. Christophe Marane, leader of the Dragon's Disciples, received a visit from a mysterious masked man bearing a taste of immense wealth and promising more, a favor he would come to regret accepting. At the same time, Ecks Alistor, erstwhile member of the Whispering Ring and last surviving Demon Hunter in the north began hearing whispers of demonic activity in the sewers. The Whispering Ring had bigger concerns, though, their leader Amal Nassar having recently won the famed smuggler ship the Red Wind in a game of cards with her elusive captain, known only as Stray. Destitute, the captain had approached one of the few friends he had, the Marquise Falaeth, who had agreed to buy back the ship in return for Stray's aid in starting her own mercantile enterprise outside the influence of her boorish husband. As if this were not enough, the first snow saw the arrival of several more independent mages to Bastion. From the elven Brightleaf Clans came Maranis Selshiram, powerful elemental mage and remarkably young commander of her own division of the elite Evergreen Sentinels. Arriving in the city with the intent to establish diplomatic relations with the government of Bastion, Maranis was dismayed to discover that word of her coming had never reached the city, and she was neither expected nor especially wanted. Seeing no other option, she elected to watch Bastion from the shadows, becoming a barmaid at the Dragon's Alcove, Waterfront tavern and not-so-secret headquarters of the Dragon's Disciples. While there, she met the orc noble Gazrok Kalikasan, who had similarly arrived in Bastion penniless and unknown. In a more reputable part of town, the necromancer William Knob had rented out a hotel room, setting the groundwork for his fortune as a freelance mage, and the sentient golem Colmdran had found himself the object of fear and curiosity wandering Bastion's alleys. Sadah arrived, the Falaeth manor bedecked in decorations and guarded by none other than Bastion's elite First Regiment, commanded by Lord Marshal Alric doSturmbhat. This was the inevitable response to a string of kidnappings across the city that had recently claimed a pair of noble twins, kidnappings Ecks suspected to be demon related. Nevertheless, Turel arrived in exquisite style, outshining Captain Stray despite the captain's theft of the First Regiment payroll to afford his outfit, much to the captain's distress. Both exchanged gifts with the host and hostess, before Turel left to mingle and Stray left to drink alongside a trio of teenaged debutantes (and their very interested fop of a brother). Maranis arrived in slightly more subdued style, sneaking in through the roof and "borrowing" one of Elizabeth's old gowns before making her appearance, while Ecks impersonated one of the staff in order to get closer to what he suspected was a cult of noble demon worshipers. Gazrok, despite his best intentions, became lost in the sewers and never arrived. The party progressed swimmingly, even seeing the arrival of the Princess of Bastion, until Ecks located a man stinking of demonic residue. Escorting the young baron out of the house under false pretenses, Ecks knocked the man out and attempted to abduct him with Whispering Ring associates, only to be spotted by Turel. Abandoning the party, Turel gave chase, only to witness Ecks demon slayer bloodline first hand when the young man cut down one of his possessed colleagues. For you see, Turel was merely some foreign noble, but an abomination of pride possessed of terrible power and served by the very demons of the Nether, one of whom had been the man to provide Christophe his unexpected windfall. Thanks to his powers, Ecks survived the chase, only for the carriage he was in to crash, forcing him to abandon the stunned but very much alive baron. Seizing the chance to be a hero, Turel rescued the boy while at the same time sending his servant Zhirad to turn the kidnapping to his advantage. Riding back to the Falaeth estate, Turel was intercepted by a squad of the First Regiment and escorted back. Suspecting him to be complicit in the kidnapping, a lieutenant of the regiment struck Turel in the presence of the party guests, shaming the Lord Marshal and enraging Elizabeth. However, Turel recovered quickly, fetching a second suit of clothes from his carriage and arriving back to the party as the toast of the town. Meanwhile, in the Bastion sewers a far darker scene was playing out. Guided by the scent of Blood Magic, Zhirad was quick to locate the hideout of the cultists responsible for the kidnappings. Possessing one of the brutes, he quickly dispatched the rest before attending to the children. Seeing their broken bodies, he struck on an idea, and escorted them out of the lair and towards where the sewer met the sea. Hot on his heels was a band of Whispering Ring agents led by a bruised but very much alive Ecks, who discovered the hideout scant minutes after Zhirad. Discovering the children gone, they hurried to catch up only to find four of them - the common children - abandoned in the filth. But the noble girls were still missing. Pressing on alone, Ecks eventually found them, bathed in the moonlight shining over Bastion Bay. One was dead already, the sigil of the Whispering Ring carved into her stomach. Before Zhirad could tend to the other, Ecks struck, and as the dead girl floated away on the tide Zhirad fled the possessed body before he was destroyed. But that was not the end of the revelations that night! Late in the party, Stray and Elizabeth stepped aside, Elizabeth having already secured the loan from the Royal Bank that would ensure ownership of the Red Wind. However, their talk turned to Stray's gift, a collection of fables that Elizabeth had loved as a child, and in a moment of passion the smuggler revealed to Elizabeth that he was a Beguiler, a feared and hated class of mage with powers over the mind. In a fall of pink snow, they embraced, unaware that a pair of eyes watched from a far off window. Turel found Elizabeth soon after, and what followed was a dark conversation, he testing the limits of her morality, her confused and frightened by the suddenness of his questions. They parted on uneasy terms, and the night came to an end. The next day, Maranis and Gazrok set out to locate the missing children, unaware that the crisis had already been resolved. At the same time, Elizabeth made her way into Whispering Ring territory, a chest of four thousand sovereigns with her. Confronting Amal Nassar, she convinced him to sell her the Red Wind - she and Stray celebrated in his bedchamber. Unaware and uncaring of the adultery being committed above, Gazrok and Maranis finally located the abandoned cultist base, as well as the headless corpse of the man Zhirad had possessed. A trained arcanist, Maranis recognized the traces of demonic magic, her first clue that all was not well in Bastion. Exiting the sewers, she resolved to increase the intensity of her training, finding an isolated place outside of Bastion where she could safely use her magic. In one such session, she was surprised by the arrival of Vazrisa, an old rival from Sentinel Training, who informed her of the shifting goals of her clan - the elves were mobilizing in preparation for an anticipated crisis. Vazrisa left with some acidic parting words, and Maranis prepared to welcome her division earlier than expected. Over the next few weeks, some sixty elven commandos would enter Bastion, posing as simple craftsmen until they were needed. At the same time, Stray readied for his first voyage for Elizabeth, and was entrusted with a Sentinel communique to Vazrisa by Maranis - a communique he would come to regret. Yes, much happened in the wake of Sadah, but nothing more important than the discovery of the murdered noble girl in the water. Already enraged by the kidnapping and attempted kidnapping of one of their own, the nobility roared for vengeance, and while the Lord Marshal argued for temperance Turel used his newfound celebrity to move the city to war. Unable to resist the commands of his employers, the Lord Marshal declared martial law on the Waterfront, sealing the district and moving troops in to exterminate the Whispering Ring. Having seen this coming and possessing an unexpected supply of funds, Christophe had already evacuated the district for the small fishing town of Alton by the Sea, leaving the First Regiment and the Whispering Ring ample space for their battleground. What some had assumed would be an easy action by the guard soon became a protracted siege, the Whispering Ring mounting an incredible defense courtesy of the four thousand sovereigns given them by Elizabeth. So well funded were they that they managed to lure the elusive elven assassin El Cazador to the Waterfront, where his skills with a bow left the First Regiment terrified of the streets until his reign of terror was brought to an end by William and Colmdran. Maranis herself joined in the First Regiment's efforts, finally managing a meeting with the Lord Marshal to explain her intended position as emissary of the Evergreen Sentinels. Gazrok fought beside his elven partner nobly in that time, the actions of those few heroes helping to push back against an increasingly desperate Whispering Ring. These events did not occur in a vacuum, though, and while the Waterfront burned hundreds of people had been forced into a refugee camp in the Drake Street Market. Moved by the plight of the commons, Elizabeth Falaeth organized an intervention by the noble ladies of Bastion, bringing food and fresh blankets to what had become a hive of hastily constructed tents. Elizabeth's bravery was commendable, all the more so when one considers the rapid deterioration of her husband days prior. Informed that Turel Meresin had seized nearly a quarter of his business interests thanks to newly discovered deeds, Andiron had fallen into a bitter spiral of drunken abusiveness that pushed their chilly marriage ever closer to the breaking point. All she desired was to bring relief and to seize a chance for solitude, but that was denied her. Turel had also come to the camp, though not for Elizabeth. In the opening days of the siege he had rescued a particular boy from the depredations of the First Regiment, a boy with a unique gift. Jon Cole, though a poor orphan and conscript of the Whispering Ring, was from an impressive bloodline, a family that possessed a natural resistance to all magic. Seeking to capitalize of the find, Turel had taken the boy into his service, and had even promised a home for his orphan friends. Thus, his path crossed that of the Marquise, whose exhaustion burned away to fury at the sight of the man who had set her husband to madness. Their meeting did not go well, only to be interrupted by the sudden appearance of a grievously wounded Gazrok on the scene, the orc having only just escaped a Whispering Ring ambush. Rushing to his side, Turel was joined by a mysterious doctor named Jack Whatley, who healed Gazrok with what could only be a strange form of Blood Magic. A crisis averted, Turel managed a few quiet moments with Elizabeth before departing, a horde of orphans in tow. The dinner with Whatley would prove most beneficial, as Turel learned that they shared a goal - the discovery of the infamous Codex Maleficarum. Whatley, blinded by his own ambitions, failed to realize the enormity of his mistake, for he had discovered the resting place of the Codex thanks to he connections within the mysterious Ziggurat conspiracy. But it was not the book he sought, but its mystic bindings for his adopted son Colmdran. Sensing a unique opportunity, Turel allowed the man to talk, to confess his desires for the blasphemous tome before offering his hesitant aid in providing a copy for the Codex's adamant chains. Some nights later, Whatley struck, unleashing a massive necromental upon Bastion University and bypassing wards meant to keep demons at bay. The chains were removed and replaced without incident, loosing the beacon of the Codex to resonate through the Nether. As soon as Whatley had gone, Turel appeared, bearing a mundane duplicate of nonsense demonic to replace the artifact. The switch made, he returned home and placed the Codex in a sealed box, quenching its beacon once again. Far off in the night, the combined forces of the First Regiment, William, and Colmdran managed to finally subdue the necromental beneath a portcullis, yet another nightmarish scenario for an already exhausted guard. Chaos in the Waterfront persisted, and as it did Stray made his way south towards the Hefrizian Principalities. There, he managed to locate Vazrisa, who presented him with a startling opportunity - to turn Stray over to Vivexia in order to collect his thousand sovereign bounty before mounting a prison break and splitting the profits. Ever one for audacity, Stray agreed, setting in mind a plan that would have gone perfectly if not for the intervention of Commodore Ahu, renowned Vivexian officer and captain of the VNS Will of the Storm. The Vivexian warship intercepted the Red Wind before she'd left sight of shore, and as the crews clashed the two captains engaged in a pitched duel. The Red Wind managed to escape, but had to abandon her captain to the clutches of a vengeful Vivexia. Stray would spend the next few months under constant torture by other Beguilers, the Vivexian Inquisitors seeking to turn him into a potent weapon for their side. Eventually, the Waterfront Siege came to a head through the actions of a simple Cat. Martin Rapture had discovered a strange magical flute that conjured an obedient ooze weeks prior, growing to love the small creature and care for it as one would a pet. But Martin had heard the call of adventure and joined the crew of the Red Wind, leaving his ooze in the less than gentle hands of an innkeeper and his wife. The gelatinous thing was quickly deposited in the sewers, where the unending supply of biological matter allowed it to spawn with terrifying speed. Eventually, the Ring were assaulted from above and below, the ooze infestation spreading into their sewer fortress even as the First Regiment seized neighborhood after neighborhood. Pushed to the breaking point, the Amal Nassar's lieutenants betrayed him, giving him up to the First Regiment while pleading clemency that would not come. But no sooner had the siege been resolved than the ooze threat made itself known, leading to a marathon of extermination by every mage, soldier, and chemist in Bastion to prevent the city from being overrun. Finally, after nearly a month of warfare Amal Nassar was publicly executed, putting an end to the Whispering Ring. In the aftermath, Ecks Alistor was accused of being the Whispering Ring's demonic mastermind, a charge seemingly reinforced by the arrival of a fully manifest Wrath Demon to defend against his arrest by the First Regiment. The demon was defeated, but rather than execute him the Lord Marshal spared Ecks' life, staging his execution and leaving the demon hunter in his debt. By the end of the Waterfront Siege, there was only one man better off - Turel Meresin. As the Dragon's Disciples moved in to reclaim their territory and the territory of the Whispering Ring, control of the criminal element of the Waterfront seemed assured, possession of the Codex was an advantage beyond compare, and to his knowledge the only one capable of harming him had died in shame. Everything was going according to plan, until Vivexia entered the game. Seeking to expand further north, Vivexia purchased the services of a vast pirate fleet, sending the brigands to assault the weakened city. The armada struck scant days after the resolution of the siege, dozens of ships breaking through the Bastion Navy and occupying Bastion Bay. Against this unexpected threat rose every hero of Bastion, as well as Turel. He would not suffer another nation to conquer his city, and so on the eve of the attack the Shadow King made his first appearance. Teleporting from rooftop to rooftop, slinging gouts of hellfire, he managed to cripple one of the pirate vessels, soon to be matched by Maranis' feats of spellcraft and a cannon barrage overseen by Christophe himself. Roving mobs of pirate looters were met by a renewed Gazrok, Colmdran, and William, driven off by terrifying forces arrayed against them. Still, the pirate fleet was hardly diminished, until Turel deployed the Codex. Unleashed for the first time, the tome unleashed a bolt of pure hatred against the pirates, tearing a red gash in the sky and annihilating the pirates to a man. In the wake of his victory, the Shadow King declared himself to Bastion before disappearing. Alone, Turel collapsed, nearly destroyed himself by wielding the Codex's awesome might. Months passed, and the Waterfront began to rebuild. A recuperating Turel withdrew from the public eye, leaving Maranis and William few leads to follow to discover the identity of the Shadow King. Andiron continued his slide into madness, and the rest of Bastion breathed easy for the first time in months. The new year was marked by the beginning of the opera season in Bastion, the city's theater and opera company enjoying renovation thanks to a mysterious new benefactor. The masquerade gala that opened the evening was magnificent, for some more than others. Having dragged her husband along, Elizabeth shared a fiery tango with a man calling himself the Night Raven. Maranis, William, Colmdran, and Gazrok found themselves celebrated as the Heroes of Bastion, invited to share the premier box with the operas unknown owner. He would not remain unknown long, however, as the unmasking revealed it to be none other than Turel, newly granted a noble title by the King of Bastion and reentering the social scene in grand style. What was left of Andiron's control snapped, then, and the elven noble stormed off. During the performance of Il Bravo, the Heroes of Bastion were invited to a lunch the next day, while Elizabeth received a cryptic invitation to meet the Night Raven on the roof. The opera ended, and against her better judgement Elizabeth answered the summons. The Night Raven was waiting for her, revealing himself as Turel, having used a costume change to conceal their dance from her husband. Agreeing to start fresh in the spirit of the new year, he convinced Elizabeth to close her eyes. When she opened them, they stood atop the highest tower of Castle Bastion, the lights of the city spread out below them, a candlelit dinner waiting. Elizabeth's reaction was not what Turel intended, but after calming her unknown fear of heights they managed a lovely evening, unaware that they had been watched. For a Sentinel had been on that rooftop, and seen the Marquise spirited away by teleporting magics. She was set to return to Maranis, only to be ambushed by the members of the Shadow Court. Though she ran, she was wounded by a poison blade, and fell into delirium even as she stumbled back into Maranis' makeshift headquarters. The next day, Turel's lunch was attacked by members of the Shadow Court, intent on throwing his suspicious guests off the trail if they could not be killed. Stabbed through the stomach, Turel was terribly wounded, leaving the identity of the Shadow King a mystery.